Is the Media Gaslighting Conservatives?

RUSH: It’s Richmond, Virginia. This is Ann, and welcome. Happy to have here with us. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you so much for taking my call today, Rush, and thank you for all you do.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I just wanted to make a quick point that the hard left and the media and especially Hollywood I think has been engaging in gaslighting the right.

RUSH: Would you explain…? Would you define that? I hear so many people use that word.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Would you tell me how you’re intending it to be defined?

CALLER: Okay. Gaslighting, the most common example is when, in a family, they cripple usually the nicest child in the family to take care of all of the sick and infirmed. And what they do is they ridicule that person, they talk about them, they smear at them, especially when people aren’t looking. And then if that person dares to get angry, “Oh, oh! Look, look, look at how bad you are,” and then they tell everyone they know how bad this person is, and they make up this entire narrative.

What they believe, Rush, is that that person is an idiot.

They’re not evil.

Now, I’m not saying at all that every liberal person is like this. I think that these kinds of people exist on both sides. But I think that the left elevates people like this, and I think the right tries to shut them up, and that’s really all you can do. I mean, you can’t always control who’s on your side, but you can control who you elevate, and lying is perfectly fine if you’re gaslighting. And especially the dog whistle. Because you just imagine, whatever the person says, “Oh, well, clearly that was racist. Well, they used the word ‘the.’ Oh, well, don’t you know ‘the’ is a dog whistle when someone on the right uses it? Look at all the times they use the word ‘the.'” That kind of logic —

RUSH: What word?

CALLER: “The.” T-H-E. (laughing)

RUSH: Aw, gee, I’m suffering here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, let me explain what I meant by, “I’m suffering here.” The last two callers have been speaking a mile a minute, and I’ve been unable to hear enough of what they were saying to comprehend. So I had to put it together after they hung up. The most recent caller, I lost her when she says how families will “gaslight” the weakest member of the family. I’ve never seen that. So I’m rolling that back and forth in my head. But then I finally heard what she was talking about.

Her definition of “gaslight,” I got, and her point was that the Democrats and the media get to define everything. They get to define and they get to decide everything. What they say is what “is,” and anybody who isn’t that then, of course, is abnormal or what have you. That has been my point. It’s just a different way of saying that. It irritates the hell out of me, too. I watched the media, and my favorite example of it (and I’m sorry for being redundant here) is Indiana, and there are countless examples here.

Indiana passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The media hated it. It was in response to people not being allowed to tell gay couples, “No. I’m not gonna bake a cake for your reception. My religion doesn’t allow me to do that.” So these gay couples would then target these places hoping for that reaction, and they’d file lawsuits trying to put these bakeries and photo shop businesses out of business, and the media would come right along and act like that was entirely justified, that these bigots would refuse to bake a cake or take photos of a gay wedding or reception or what have you.

So when Indiana passes a law when Pence is the governor. The media was outraged, and they began to report on this as though the whole country was outraged, that Indiana was somehow a lone outpost of racism and bigotry and homophobia. It’s this attitudinal thing that they do where what they report and the way they report it and what they say is what is normal, and they get to decide who the bigots are and who the racists are. Once that happens, you’re tagged. You’re it.

And then they run around and they started knocking on doors and asking businesses, “Would you bake a pizza? Would you make a pizza from wedding reception?” And they found a little girl, 21-year-old woman, running a pizza shop for her family. She said, “No, we wouldn’t. It would be against…” So they zeroed on this 21-year-old woman, and they wanted to make her out to be the typical Indiana bigot. She was just answering their questions naively and innocently.

She was just trying to be honest with them. She thought that they were really interested in what they were asking about. They were looking for a victim, they were looking for a target, and she fit the bill. So for however long the reporting of that went on, Indiana was odd. The people in it are odd, weird, racist, bigot, sexist homophobes. I know exactly what the caller meant. Democrats get to decide. Well, let me tell you something, folks. It’s not true anymore.

That may be the way they report it and that may be what they try to create, but people rebelled against it. It’s called Donald Trump. People rebelled against it. The Democrats, since Obama, have been losing elections. Don’t lose sight of this. Starting in 2010, the Democrats have lost over a thousand, maybe it’s closer to 1,200, electoral seats at federal state local level, and there’s a reason for this. They are being rejected, and the media is being rejected as well.

So if what the media did to the state of Indiana is gaslighting, if that’s what that definition is, then I’ll heartily enforce it and accept it. It’s this interrogation and the supremacy or superiority that goes along with that kind of coverage, and it’s everywhere. You have the synagogue shooting. Well, the obvious explanation is that Donald Trump and his conservative media posse are radicalizing people, and this becomes the narrative.

This becomes just the way it is, and everybody thinks this. It is crucial for the media the way they report these things to make it look like they are the majority and they are what’s normal, when increasingly they aren’t. And what really is happening here is that people who know they’re not, by definition — strict numbers — normal, are trying to turn everything upside down so that what they are is normal and what everybody else is is oddball, abnormal. The media’s right in there facilitating this with them.

I’m telling you, it used to work like a charm — and on many people, it still does. We still have a lot of people on our side who still want to kowtow to the media, still want to define whether or not conservatives or Republicans are succeeding by virtue of whether the media is being nice to ’em or not. It’s frustrating to no end when I run into people like that, and they’re out there. But the electoral results just in the past two years indicate that people are more and more aware of this and pushing back against it.